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FRIDAY, June 21, 2013 — In a reversal of a decades-long policy, The American Medical Association voted on Thursday to lift the ban on gay men donating blood.

“The lifetime ban on blood donation for men who have sex with men is discriminatory and not based on sound science,” William Kobler, MD, AMA board member, said in a statement. “This new policy urges a federal policy change to ensure blood donation bans or deferrals are applied to donors according to their individual level of risk and are not based on sexual orientation alone.”

While the vote is not binding, policy makers often use AMA resolutions to make laws, meaning the ban’s days could be numbered.

Screening Methods Make Donator Ban Unnecessary

Michael Gaisa, MD, assistant professor medicine and infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, said the ban should have been lifted long ago, especially since every drop of blood donated is screened heavily.

“It was highly discriminatory and not based on any data,” he said. “When screening the blood supply, physicians use a very sensitive detection test. The diagnostic window is very narrow.”

But while the AMA voted to eliminate the blanket ban on gay men donating blood, anyone who has sexual contact with someone HIV-positive is still required to wait 12 months before donating blood, which Dr. Gaisa said is an unreasonable amount of time.

“People aren’t going to be abstinent for a year,” he said. “You’re going to diminish the availability of donors with that policy.”

While waiting some time is reasonable, Gaisa said he is in favor of a much shorter waiting time.

“If you make it a month, there’s enough of a buffer to decrease the margin of error of the tests.”

In addition to voting to remove the ban, the AMA passed several other resolutions this past week, including reclassifying obesity as a disease and removing the eligibility of sugar-sweetened beverages from the federal SNAP program, formally known as food stamps. And although the resolutions have no legal standing, Gaisa said AMA resolutions often influence the decisions of policy-makers.

“Once an official body like the AMA makes a recommendation, it’s hard to ignore,” he said.

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